"I SAY, mother, what do you think?"
Jack Bond burst in at the back door of their new home one Saturday with this exclamation, threw down his carpenter's basket of tools on the floor, and his cap in the air, in joyful excitement over the news he had to tell.
"What do you think, mother?" he repeated.
"Why, that I shall box your ears, big as you are, if you throw down your tools on my new oil cloth. Take 'em away," called Mrs. Bond, raising her voice above the hissing of the frying-pan, where she was cooking steak and onions for the dinner.
Jack slowly picked up the tool-basket, and put it into the cupboard under the stairs. "The kitchen do look nice," he said, as he stepped back and surveyed it, as though he had never seen it before.
"I should think it did," said his mother, turning from her pan for a moment to admire it again. "Quite as nice as anything them stuck-up friends of yours, the Winns, have got; and I mean to have a best parlour too," added Mrs. Bond.
"But Tom Winn and his mother and sister ain't stuck-up," said Jack, still lost in admiration of the kitchen floor. "I don't think their kitchen ever looked so spick and span nice as this does, but everything about 'em was somehow different from us and our things," he added, but still looking with admiration at the new floor-cloth.
Her son's appreciation of her smart kitchen pleased Mrs. Bond, and she turned from her steaming, hissing, frying-pan to join in his admiration of her handy-work.
A change had come over the fortunes of the Bonds. Just before they left Sadler Street, a small legacy had been left them, and Jack's talk about Tom and Mrs. Winn, had given Mrs. Bond the notion that, when she got to her new home, she would turn over a new leaf, and have it neat and tidy—more like the home her son admired so much—for she was very fond of Jack, and felt half jealous of the Winns because he was so often talking about them.
So Jack's admiration, and his admission that her kitchen was now smarter than the Winns', was a gratification to her, and she was ready to hear what he had to say when he once more began.